Windows 10: What is it doing when idle?

[mfeller2]

When my laptop screen goes into power saving mode starting with the screen going blank, the fan kicks on and stays on. I am guessing that Windows is doing some housekeeping and driving up the CPU usage. But the fan stays on. How crappy is the OS that it needs that much CPU for THAT LONG? Any idea how to find out what it is, and stop it?

It's irritating, that I am in an otherwise quiet room, maybe reading something which is why my laptop starts doing power-saving things. And then the fan kicks on. And it breaks my concentration, because I can't help but ask, "what the hell is it doing? I didn't tell it to do anything".

Sorry, it is especially annoying today.

 

[TheELF]

You can always check the logs to see what exactly it is doing,in general the most common things are disk defragmentation, checking for updatable files and virus scans.

 

[Ketchup]

This really depends on what you have running at the time. If just Windows, it could be checking for or installing updates, that will really drive up the CPU, and the fan. As TheELF mention, it could be doing a virus scan, which would do the same. Do you use OneDrive? It may be pulling files to backup.

3 questions:
what AV do you run?
Are you running a hard drive?
Have you manually checked for Windows Updates recently?